2 Oceans time again …
No blog since Stockholm. Well, not much has happened, apart from having my external hard drive stolen out of my “sky-checked” backpack on an SA express flight coming back from George – be warned! What else? Oh, summer seems to have finally shuffled off and winter has arrived – Capetonians are running for cover as the temperatures plummet to below 15 degrees Celsius! – we are such a bunch of wimps!! The heaters are out, the winter duvets are on the beds, we are moaning twice as long and thrice as loud about getting up in the morning…
And it is Easter. Or it was Easter. I think that too has now passed. South Africa has this ridiculous number of holidays around this time of the year: 21st March (Human Rights Day, the anniversary of the Sharpeville massacre in 1960), 22nd April (Good Friday), 25th April (Easter Monday or whatever it is called now – Family Day, I think), 27th April (Freedom Day, the anniversary of our first democratic elections in 1994), 1st May (Workers’ Day, except this year we get the 2nd because the 1st is a Sunday and the government doesn't want to pee the workers off), 18th May (voting day for local government elections) and 16th June (Youth Day, the anniversary of the Soweto uprising in 1976). That makes, by my reckoning, 7 holidays in just under 3 months – not bad work if you can get it. Add two weeks of school and university holidays and you have an entire quarter during which it is very difficult to get anything done. But maybe I shouldn’t complain. After all, I take them too, and my salary doesn’t depend on how many days I work in the month. But I do feel for those in business, particularly owners of small businesses, for whom every day the doors are shut means another plunge in their bottom line.
This time of year is also marathon season, for me anyway. First up is the 2 Oceans, followed by the Safari. Normally they are quite far apart – 4 weeks or so, giving one time to recover from the first before diving into the second - this year they are a mere 9 days apart. 2 Oceans is always run on Easter Saturday; the Safari on the first weekend in May. Of course Easter is a festival which moves with the moon.
The beauty about half marathons is that with a modicum of baseline fitness, one can run them without too much training and still finish in a reasonably respectable time. My friend and colleague, the Handsome Masha, and I have had a busy year – who hasn’t? We tried our best to get on the road every Wednesday evening from 5 to 6 and we probably succeeded about 50% of the time. Then we’d take a gentle 1 hour jog through the leafy green suburbs of Constantia or Newlands, discussing which party not to vote for in the upcoming local elections and why not, whether religion needs philosophy or vice versa, the trials and tribulations of parenting teenagers in 2011, institutional politics and a few other odds and ends – very pleasant, but it doesn’t exactly make one into a running machine. Added to that I had my two games of squash a week against the redoubtable Shag Singe, which are more like episodes in World Wars than sports matches, and my long runs on Saturday mornings – long usually meaning about 11km. Add all that up and it is not a lot. But it is enough to run a half.
Then I discovered something called Endomondo. Well, I didn’t discover it exactly – I read about it in Runners’ World, and went and downloaded it onto my computer and Blackberry. I’ve had it for about a month now and it still blows my mind that all this can fit in a cell phone, and that it is all free. Incredible. Here’s how it works – when you are setting off you activate the program on your Blackberry or other smart phone. It uses the GPS on the phone to locate and track you. You put in the distance you are running, put your earphones in, start your playlist and start running. At the end of every km it cuts the music, and a sweet sounding female voice says something like, “Your time for the last km was 6.30. Your average time so far is 6.12. Your estimated total time is now 2 hours and 10 minutes.” Or whatever. Then the music comes back on. When you finish, you click finish and it immediately uploads all the info to the website. You can view the map and your stats, including splits, on the phone or on the website, and also your elevation and pace on the latter. Quite incredible.
We (Shinguard's Wake and I) picked up the Handsome Masha from his house in Plumstead at 4.45 a.m. Naturally, it was still dark. We drove through the unnaturally quiet streets of Wynberg, up to the M3 and then through to UCT where we found a parking space high up above Ring Road. We then walked down to the start which is in Main Road, Newlands, perhaps appropriately just in front of the brewery. I believe the field for the half this year was 14,500 or thereabouts. It certainly looked that way – runners everywhere. We dumped our sweaters with Shinguard's, who had kindly agreed to come along, and made our way to the back of the crowd. We were both in Group E – I don’t know how many groups there were. It was still a good 20 minutes until the start so we chatted and enjoyed watching the others. The man at the PA welcomed Dan Plato, the Mayor of Cape Town, who told us what fine people we all are and what a wonderful city we live in (remember there is a local election in under a month and even though he is not standing for re-election, his party is). He was asked whether he would be running next year and his reply was lost in a noise which could equally have been a guffaw or a man choking, I couldn’t tell which. But I guess we should say well done to his worship for making the start. Then they asked for silence and played the National Anthem, which I found strangely moving. This is something new – I don’t recall them doing it in the past (and this is my fourth 2 Oceans, Masha’s fifth). Then we had the countdown and then the gun. That was the start of a rather lengthy anticlimax. After 3 minutes we still hadn’t moved. Then very slowly we began to inch forward, passing over the starting mat at about 4 minutes after the gun. That is a little discouraging. Gradually we managed to speed up to a slow jog, but the truth of it is that the first km took me 10 minutes and 41 seconds, which is a hell of a long time. The second, third and fourth were likewise rather slow, considering they were flat, and it was only on the fifth that I managed anything like a decent time. This is an issue for which the 2 Oceans is apparently quite well known. I have friends and colleagues who refuse to take part in it for this reason – too big, too crowded. I guess one just grins and bears it. Added to that one has the usual problem of slow runners/walkers who have started near the front and are blocking the way. But enough grumbling – it wasn’t that bad.
Soon we were past the 5km mark on Constantia Main Road, and not long thereafter the 10km, on Parish Road Constantia. This was the easy half. Now for Southern Cross – the dreaded Southern Cross. 3-4km of steady uphill. I have done the race enough times now to know that it is doable, albeit not very comfortable. You just have to keep your head down, keep going and ignore the super-fit speed-walkers who overtake you. I was watching my heart rate – it had been in the mid 150’s for most of the race and broke 160 on Southern Cross. I discovered that if I ran the way the speed-walkers walked, I could actually go faster than if I tried running normally. That is not very well explained, but I am not sure how else to explain it – less knee action, keeping one’s feet close to the ground and using one’s quads more. This pushed my pulse to the mid 160’s and I got the odd palpitation so I desisted and throttled back a little, not wanting to become one of the race’s negative statistics or give the paramedics on the ambulances any extra work.
A highlight of the race for me is always the music groups along the way – brass bands, drum troops, dancers – as well as the crowds of ordinary people standing along the edge and cheering us on. One’s name and age category are writ fairly large on one’s label, so they can read something about you and I got quite a few shouts of encouragement. At the top of the uphill, one hears the novices tell each other “At last – thank God it is all downhill from here”, which of course it isn’t – it undulates for a few kms, then goes down and then kicks you in the teeth in the last 3km up the M3. But anything is better than sweating up Southern Cross and so the mood is justifiably ebullient once one has turned that corner. The other thing about that particular piece of road is that it has been built with quite a vicious camber which makes running difficult and sometimes treacherous.
Soon we were at the top gate of the Kirstenbosch Gardens. Here they have a shower tent – one can choose to run through and get sprayed, which is a nice thought. Then down past the main gate, and along Rhodes Drive to the M3. I could see that I was going to get to the intersection at almost exactly 2 hours, and was hoping this would be good enough to get me home in less than 2:15. As usual I underestimated the last 3km – it is a stretch I have run many times on Wednesday afternoons and I always enjoy it. Somehow at the end of 18km of tough running, it doesn’t hold quite the same attraction – it is like purgatory, step by painful step. But one keeps going because, well one just does. Finally the UCT rugby fields come into view and it is just a case of pulling it all together for the last 500m. Again these are deceptive – the grass seems to slow one down. Maybe it is just the imagination. On the other hand, one has the crowds and the cheering and the man on the PA shouting all sorts of crazy things and it feels great. The digital clock read 2:17 as I crossed the line – not my best but not too bad for a relatively old fart like me.
And then it is over – medal, phone herself to let her know that one is not in ICU (yet), coke, sausage roll, tea and rusk, apple, the (really) painful climb over the bridge and up the stairs to Rugby Road, collapse on the grass verge and wait for the others. Shinguard's Wake materialised out of the ether, and about 10 minutes later the Handsome Masha did likewise. He had done a 2.53. We exchanged congratulations and then headed for the car. As we left the campus and headed south on the M3 the first runners in the ultra 56km race were just arriving – they had managed 56km in just a little more than we had taken for 21km. Incredible. Great race. There’s a reason it attracts 25 000 runners between the races – it really is a great race. Roll on 2 Oceans 2012.
Race stats courtesy of endomondo - what a great program.
Title | Two Oceans Half Marathon |
Sport | Running |
Start Time | Apr 23, 2011 6:00 AM |
Distance | 21.28 km |
Duration | 2h:17m:32s |
Avg Speed | 6:28 min/km |
Max Speed | 4:07 min/km |
Calories | 1801 kcal |
Altitude | 51 m / 225 m |
Elevation | 227 m ↑ / 165 m ↓ |
